Abstract
Based on the real-life experience of dissident Chinese filmmaker Ying Liang, A Family Tour centers on a Chinese woman director exiled in Hong Kong after making a subversive feature about a mass murder in Shanghai. The autobiographical film piques our reflection upon the internalization of diasporic identity of a community of citizens who have felt/fell out of place in their own homeland. Bai Xue’s The Crossing reveals how borderscape frames cinematic storytelling to provide a possibility of border-thinking. Set on the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen in China, a teenage schoolgirl embarks on a smuggling career by crossing physical borders and moral boundaries. The chapter examines the sociopolitical dynamics of borderscape and HKSAR cinema under the unstable “One Country, Two Systems.”
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Notes
- 1.
For colonial Hong Kong’s refugee crisis in the context of Cold War Asia, see Glen Peterson, “To Be or Not to Be a Refugee: The International Politic of the Hong Kong Refugee Crisis, 1949–55,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no.2 (2008): 171–195.
- 2.
Laura Madokoro, Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 132.
- 3.
K.K. Lam, “One Hundred Years of Lo Wu Bridge (Part Two)—Lo Bridge Witnessed the Gradual Opening of the Border,” Hong Kong Commercial Daily, 7 March 2018. (https://www.hkcd.com/content/2018-03/07/content_1081407.html).
- 4.
K.C. Lo, “Hong Kong cinema as ethnic borderland,” in E. M. K. Cheung, G. Marchetti, and E.C.M. Yau (eds.), A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 72.
- 5.
The trope of “borders” and “boundaries” was deployed by leftwing filmmakers to advocate community building and social cohesion in postwar Hong Kong. See Jing Jing Chang “Negotiating Cold War and Postcolonial Politics: Borders and Boundaries in 1950s Hong Kong Cinema,” in Joseph Tse-Hei Lee and Satish Kolluri (eds.), Hong Kong and Bollywood: Globalization of Asian Cinemas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 137–161.
- 6.
Vivian P.Y. Lee, Hong Kong Cinema since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 84.
- 7.
For the notion of “intranational migration” in world migrant literature, see Dohra Ahmad and Edwidge Danticat (eds.), The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns (New York: Penguin Books, 2029), xvii.
- 8.
Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2000), 173.
- 9.
Nick Browne, “Society and Subjectivity: On the Political Economy of Chinese Melodrama,” in Nick Browne et al (eds.), New Chinese Cinema: Forms, Identities, Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 40–56.
- 10.
Quoted from the film’s ending titles; it read in Chinese: “就像走在這條路上 / 我們註定相遇一樣 / 做這樣的事 / 走這樣的人生之路 / 斯世、斯國.”
- 11.
Ruby Cheung, “A Chinese Diasporic Festival Film in the making? The interesting case of Ann Hui’s A Simple Life,” in Felicia Chan and Andy Willis (eds.), Chinese Cinemas: International perspectives (Abington: Routledge, 2016), 170. For a study of how film festivals play a role in Ann Hui’s film career, see Gina Marchetti, “The Networked Storyteller and Her Digital Tale: Film Festivals and Ann Hui’s My Way,” Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images 1, no. 2 (2021): 1–31.
- 12.
About 60 film festivals across the continents have screened A Family Tour in the past few years, including Loncarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Tokyo FILMeX, and Hong Kong International Film Festival. I am indebted to Ying Liang for his information.
- 13.
Tõnu Õnnepalu, Border State, trans. Madli Puhvel (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 3.
- 14.
Õnnepalu, Border State, 38.
- 15.
Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 34–50.
- 16.
For a stimulating analysis of Hong Kong cinema and the ambiguous imagination of borderscape and nationhood, see Weng Kit Chan, “Beyond Nationhood: Border and Coming of Age in Hong Kong Cinema,” Global Media and China 5, no. 2 (2020): 154–168.
- 17.
Wendy Gan, “Re-imagining Hong Kong-China from the Sidelines: Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung and Durian Durian,” in Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See-Kam (eds.), Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 111–125.
- 18.
Vivian P.Y. Lee, Hong Kong Cinema since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 174–175.
- 19.
René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1965).
- 20.
Miranda May Szeto, “Identity Politics and Its Discontents: Contesting Cultural Imaginaries in Contemporary Hong Kong,” Interventions 8, no. 2 (2006): 256–257.
- 21.
The Chinese title of Ying Liang’s A Family Tour is Ziyou xing (自由行), which is exactly the one used by the Hong Kong government to refer to the scheme of ‘Self-guided tour’.
- 22.
In 2009, Hong Kong launched the “Multiple-entry Endorsement” (一簽多行) programme for Shenzhen’s residents, which made Sheung Shui, near the Lo Wu Control Point, a parallel trading hub for mainland peddlers. The commercial activities had driven rents up, squeezing small family shops out of business in favor of retail chains. During the “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” (光復香港, 時代革命) movement in 2019, Hong Kongers from the northern district organized a “Liberate Sheung Shui” (光復上水) rally with the theme “Get Rid of Smuggling Goods, Restore the Community’s Peacefulness” (踢走水貨走私, 還我寧靜社區). For a discussion of localism and social disturbances arising from parallel trading activities, see Samson Yuen and Sanho Chung, “Explaining Localism in Post-handover Hong Kong: An Eventful Approach,” China Perspectives [Online], 1 September 2019. (http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/8044); Tsz Yiu Terry Wan et al., “Parallel Trading and Its Implications for Policing the Border,” Social Transformations in Chinese Societies 12, no.1 (2016): 77–96. (www.emeraldinsight.com/1871-2673.htm).
- 23.
Rachel Cheung, “A Tale of Two Cities,” South China Morning Post, 7 May 2019. (https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3009167/tale-two-cities-director-her-film-about-teen-smuggling).
- 24.
Zilu “Luna” Zeng, “The Crossing: A Depoliticized Hong Kong,” China Focus, 9 July 2019. (https://chinafocus.ucsd.edu/2019/07/09/film-review-the-crossing/).
- 25.
The Crossing won the support of the Film Directors Guild’s Young Director Support Program in 2016, and secured funding from film production company Wanda Media.
- 26.
Warsan Shire, “Home,” quoted from When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, eds. Eva Respini and Ruth Erickson (Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 2019), 29.
- 27.
Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6.
- 28.
By mid-2021, 90,000 residents had left Hong Kong amid a wave of emigration in the year after the national security law was imposed in July 2020, followed by broad crackdown on pro-democracy activities, leading to a significant 1.2 per cent drop in the city’s population. The mass exodus provides a glimpse of the deep societal wounds inflicted on Hong Kong, separating families and communities as people move elsewhere hoping to find the freedoms they have lost. See Chan Ho-him, “Hong Kong experiences ‘alarming’ population drop, but government says not all 90,000 leaving city because of national security law,” South China Morning Post, 12 August 2021. (https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3144845/hong-kongs-experiences-alarming-population-drop-government). Pak Yiu and Marius Zaharia, “Leaving Hong Kong,” Reuters, 21 December 2020. (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/hongkong-security-emigration/).
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Ng, K.K.K. (2022). Borderscape, Exile, Trafficking: The Geopoetics of Ying Liang’s A Family Tour and Bai Xue’s The Crossing. In: Yunzi Li, M., Tally Jr., R.T. (eds) Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_4
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